Tuesday, June 26, 2012

SWTOR's patch 1.3 landed today. I'd previously posted about the questionable pricing of a character-specific companion affection perk, so I figured an update was in order.

The issue with these perks is that there is a relatively limited amount of total affection each character will get during their career, the perks do NOT apply across your entire legacy, and each point of affection can be assigned a value in credits based on the cost of gifts. Paying a large number of credits for an exp bonus that cannot be earned any other way - thus saving you time in leveling - is a luxury item. Paying a large amount of credits for an affection bonus when you could have just purchased enough gifts to get that much affection for a smaller amount of credits is just bad planning.

Anyway, in response Bioware tweaked the numbers - the bonus has been doubled and the cost slashed by 2.5-fold. The good news is that the entry level perks are a very attractive deal, especially for newer characters. (The deal gets worse as you complete more of the story, because you will have fewer remaining quests to benefit from the bonus.) At 10K each for 10% bonuses to gifts and conversation gains, I'm not going to spend too long worrying about whether I got the best deal.

Unfortunately, I'm still not convinced about the higher ranks. It's an extra 30K credits (per bonus) for an additional 10% affection, but my guess is that you will most likely cap out your affection with most or all of your companions before you really benefit from this increase. I guess the real question is whether +20% to conversations would allow you to slash or eliminate your gift budget - you will definitely profit from a single rank of the gift perk if you're handing out rank 1 gifts until they stop awarding points, but this will still cost you some money (roughly 30K credits per companion for the non-picky companions). Then again, the numbers are probably close enough that it doesn't really matter.

If you're curious, here's an update to my numbers on how much you can save on rank 1 and 2 vendor gifts with the 10% bonus.

2 comments:

First you have to figure out the open market value of the gifts you are consuming. (Even if you're paying less through a crew skill, there's an opportunity cost in terms of which skill you take and what other missions your dudes could run.)

Then you have to figure out your cost in credits per point of rep, which could be all over the place if you are running crewskill missions and throwing whatever you get at the companion who likes it most and you have different folks at different affection tiers.

That said, one example:Currently @ 8000, looking to get to 9600 (10 rank 5 blue gifts)10% bonus affection means you get to 9584 with only 9 rank 5 blue gifts, which is likely close enough.If the gifts are going for 2500 credits and you avoid using one per companion for all five companions, you obviously win by paying 10K for 10% bonus versus 12.5K for the five gifts. The second rank costs three times as much, however, so probably wouldn't be in your best interest at that price range.

The other reason why I focused on vendor gifts is because they can basically render the rest of the discussion moot for a new character. If you're starting at 4000-6000 affection per character, which is NOT costly, and does not require a crewskill, you have a decent chance of capping out that character's affection through quests.

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About Player Versus Developer

I'm what they call a "WoW Tourist" - WoW was my first MMO, and being able to set my own schedule is a dealbreaker. At any given time, I can be found ducking in and out of half a dozen different MMO's.

This blog details some of my own personal exploits, but it also focuses on a meta-gaming issue that I find very interesting - the decisions developers make on how to reward player activity, and the decisions players make in response to maximize their own rewards.